Rio Tinto Transforms its Web Presence with Open Text Web Solutions

WATERLOO - Open Text(TM) Corporation, announced that Rio Tinto, one of the world's largest mining and exploration companies, has transformed its Web presence through the implementation of Open Text Web Solutions.

Over the years, Rio Tinto has grown significantly, often through mergers and strategic partnerships, which has led to more than 80 separate Web sites being created and run by separate divisions and individual mines around the world. This has caused significant challenges in communicating a consistent brand and sending coherent messages to its many stakeholders including investors, customers, suppliers, employees and the media.

To address these issues, Bryan Smith, Principal Adviser, Digital Media in Rio Tinto's Corporate Communications function, set out a clear strategy to transform Rio Tinto's global Web communications. The strategy focused on building a hub of Web templates - created, populated and managed centrally, but tagged for dissemination through the various Rio Tinto Web domains around the world. As a result Open Text was chosen to help engineer a high quality, worldwide Web presence that required minimal resources and with the flexibility to combine a consistent corporate image with local content generation.

Rio Tinto also appointed brand and digital media consultancy Rufus Leonard to handle the technical build of the Web infrastructure and work with a creative agency, View, on a new Web design. In addition to implementing a consistent and professional presentation for Rio Tinto around the world, a key requirement was for local operations to be able to add their own content within certain page frames while adhering to the global design and presentation standards.

"We conducted a thorough review of all the most appropriate Web content management systems. Our evaluations revealed Open Text as being clearly the best for our purposes in terms of cost, governance, platforms and outcomes," Smith explained. "We wanted a cost effective solution from a responsible global organization that could be trusted to deliver. We steered away from open source solutions or products that were restricted to only a small number of high-profile, high-cost consultancy implementers."

Smith continued: "Open Text Web Solutions is based on Microsoft .net which gives us the important benefit of being able to develop our own applications and plug them into the global Web cascade. Open Text Web Solutions also allows us to run multiple Web sites from the core software hub, in multiple languages, and populating multiple domains. This is vital to us as a major, multi-product, global business."

In addition to traditional text and images, the Open Text solution enables Rio Tinto to centrally load more sophisticated content, including external data feeds and video presentations, which are then transmitted to the world-wide domain sites.

The template pages in the central hub are tagged to target downloads to appropriate divisions and countries. Not all the global Web sites carry the same content, and flexible templates with blank frames are provided within the Open Text Content Management System (CMS) for local content uploads. "We have completed a successful large-enterprise Web project that meets our corporate objectives at low cost to develop and very low cost to maintain," Smith concludes. "Open Text played an essential role in what we have achieved. The beauty of what we have, going forward, is control over our global Web presence, intrinsic scalability and an easy ability to deal with both changes in our business and the adoption of new generations of web communication as they evolve."

Simon Harrison, Vice President of Sales, Northern Europe, Open Text, commented: "We have been really pleased with the success of this project and it has been a pleasure to work with Rio Tinto, one of the world's leading mining and exploration companies. We look forward to continuing this relationship and supporting them further in the future."